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Archive for July, 2007

I just commited the changes to Sofud that make it work with Tango instead of Phobos. As expected, it wasn’t really difficult, just annoying. Writing I/O code is pretty error prone if you’re working on the level of Tango conduits and trying to support all Unicode encodings. Debugging was the really tough part of it; most of the conversion was done with a couple of find & replaces.

I shall release this version as 1.0.alpha.2 as soon as I feel like it. Right now, I’m too exhausted from bug fixing. :o)

By the way, I finally found a nice text editor that can correctly handle any Unicode encoding. It’s a small freeware called BabelPad. To my puzzlement, most editors out there can only handle UTF-8 and UTF-16, even though UTF-32 has been around for a long time now.

I’ve finally had an opportunity to try out Tango. As it seems like I’ll be using it for my game project (details to come… maybe), I’ll switch Sofud over to Tango.

As I don’t have the energy to create and maintain a dual version, there will be no Phobos support. I think this is better than the other way round, because I already feel that Tango, although the documentation isn’t complete yet, is more complete and better designed than Phobos.

I hope moving to Tango won’t be a big problem, so I plan to do it within the next week or so. After that, an alpha.2 release may be due.

I went ahead and released Sofud 1.0.alpha.1, even though the web site doesn’t say anything about it yet. (This has to do with me having restructured the web site, but not having the time to move all the content to the new site.)

(Almost complete) code documentation is included, but pretty much no other documentation. So if you try to use this version, you’re in for an adventure. 😉

Of course, you’re welcome to send me email (s.beschke@gmx.de) if you have any questions. Still, if you’re not willing to experiment, I advise you to wait for a better documented version.

I put this version together mainly so I can focus on getting more stability before starting on the few features that are still missing from a “real” 1.0. This is because I needed a version of Sofu I can really use in my projects.